"Marketing" entries

Are Ebook Device Makers Missing the Market?

Over on Dear Author, Jane Litte suggests current ebook device marketers aren't effectively targeting what is likely the most influential segment of their market — women: The idea is to get women thinking that the vehicle fits into their lives, rather than the woman fitting her life around the vehicle. The most recent Kindle 2.0 ad shows a business man…

Extraordinary Piece on the Future (and Past) of Digital Books

Over on Ars Technica, John Siracusa revisits the history of the ebook, and explains why he thinks there's very much a future in digital reading

iPhone App Outperforms Most Print (Computer) Books This Holiday Season

Conventional wisdom suggests that when choosing pilot projects, you pick ones with a high likelihood of success. It's hard to argue that iPhone: The Missing Manual was a reasonable choice for testing the iPhone App waters. But while we knew it would do well, we've been quite pleased with just how well: If the iPhone App by itself had been…

Conversation is the New King

Kate Eltham calls out publishers who blog through a PR lens and points the way to publisher blogs that fully embrace the medium: It used to be common wisdom that content is king. But the popularity of social media has demonstrated that what internet users are really seeking is connection. A blog may be a cheap and easy way…

Publishers Need to Get In on the Conversation

Kassia Krozser has a Cluetrain-like manifesto for publishers. From Booksquare: It's time to get your hands dirty, to dig into the real-world conversation. It's a weird thing, and sometimes awkward and uncomfortable, especially if you're accustomed to public relations-speak and the cheerleader behavior that accompanies marketing messages. When you talk directly to real people who read and buy books,…

How Should Authors Promote Themselves Online?

As the director of an organisation for writers I was curious about the announcement of Random House's new Web toolkit to assist RH authors to set up and maintain their own Web pages. booktrade.info reports: … the toolkit allows authors to customise their pages with a choice of backgrounds, fonts and colours. Authors can then select different types of content…

What We Talk About When We Talk About XML (Apologies to Raymond Carver)

Acronyms and initialisms are mysterious and potent, and frequently hide meaning and become shorthand for larger concepts. Just as ONIX became shorthand for "metadata,, XML (at least in book publishing land) is becoming shorthand for … well, a lot of things. Repurposing content, creating templates for book design, tagging — all of these are encompassed in the term "XML workflow."…

Visualizing the Advantages of StartWithXML

Here are two ways to think about why a StartWithXML workflow can be important and valuable: 1. Until very recently, we lived in a world where the book was the sun and everything else orbited around it. Now the CONTENT, the IP, is the sun, and the book is relegated to one of the satellite bodies (still often the biggest,…

Sports Illustrated Offers Ad Space through Web Bids

Sports Illustrated is using a Web-based bidding system to sell advertising across its online and offline properties. From Advertising Age Executives at the Time Inc. title, the first one to try an online auction, said the move was partly to recruit those advertisers that aren't in close touch with the sales force anyway. "There are many advertisers out there that…

What Authors Can Learn from Silicon Valley

Sramana Mitra of Forbes.com sees parallels between author Elle Newmark's grassroots audience development and Silicon Valley's software process: In Silicon Valley, we do alpha and beta products — small prototypes of our vision — and recruit a small number of customers to gain early validation of the products' viability. These alpha and beta products, along with early customer validation,…